RHIZOMEMIND

Driven by a desire to understand what it means to engage critically and creatively with AI in a time of ecological urgency, the Western University Film Festival (Formerly the Western Film & Art Festival)—a key component of the Mapping Digital Environmentalism project—explores how the infrastructures and operational logics of AI, often embedded with bias and extractive histories, can be reconfigured through creative interventions that challenge dominant narratives and expand ecological imaginaries.​

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This event creates space for dialogue, reflection, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, foregrounding AI as a terrain of struggle over the conditions of knowing, experiencing, and relating. In doing so, we explore what/how creative interventions might re-engineer the very architectures of perception toward more just, plural, and ecologically resonant futures. By thematizing AI and emerging digital technologies as plural milieux of perception, the festival raises questions such as: 

• How can AI help us to ‘hesitate’ or slowdown in our aesthetic and sense-making practices with respect to ecological relations? 

• How do creative engagements with AI open up new avenues for resistance, experimentation, and reimagining? 

• How might digital environmentalism disrupt extractive or appropriative knowledge economies and instead cultivate community engagement and growth?​